Spiced Brown Butter Pecan Dark Chocolate Cookies

I hit peak isolation baking this week – finally joined the sourdough party, then got even more quarantine cult and used that precious discard to resurrect neglected bananas into golden sugar-crusted loaves. I resisted sourdough for a long time. I imagined it to be a time-consuming endeavour that would only yield an inferior product to what I could easily buy from my local. I was turned off by the multitude of starter tuturials filling my instagram feed. And I’ll now admit I was wrong. Time wasn’t an issue – a few minutes feeding in the evening, and a couple of hours intermittently folding the dough the day before you bake. What I didn’t factor into the equation was the level of satisfaction a bakery-worthy loaf would achieve (sorry, yes that’s a shameless brag). A bubbled browned crust shattering on slicing, a wide open ear (sourdough language, ok?) and a soft, open crumb with much more flavour than most store-bought bread would ever dream of. Best eaten with generous slabs of salted butter. At the very least, a new and very gratifying skill.

(And if you’re also interested: I relied heavily on recipes by Ed Kimber (over at The Boy Who Bakes) and Hannah (at The Swirling Spoon) the first couple of times, and they both have great step-by-step tutorials on their blogs and video tutorials in instagram highlights.)

Banana bread using sourdough discard was clearly the obvious next step (I used a recipe by Izy over at Top with Cinnamon (incidentally also vegan)). I don’t know quite why, individually and together, banana bread and sourdough have emerged as the popularity contest winners of social isolation. Sourdough is complex and takes time, a little more challenging but the ultimate stuck-at-home project; banana bread is basic and comforting, a forgiving, versatile but perhaps equally satisfying venture. Both are therapeutic, especially when puzzles and zoom calls just aren’t doing the trick. Sourdough in its routine, in the stretches and folds of that increasingly elastic dough, in the magical transformation of just flour and water. Banana bread in the ease with which its smell fills the house, the productive use of those gross bananas you bought and never got round to eating, and the small (ok, large) joy of sitting down to warm cake and tea. That probably doesn’t explain the phenomenon entirely – maybe more comes down to the viral properties of social media (a la #thecookies, or #thestew). If everyone else is doing something, how much more do you want to experience it too?

If you’re not on the sourdough bandwagon, my other favourite banana bread recipes include:

• The most luxurious version I’ve ever baked, more like dessert than bread, by Violet Bakery. Add chocolate chunks and it really is dessert.
• A never fail tahini, olive oil and honey version, studded with toasted walnuts and topped with sesame seeds. A little sturdier, also delicious.

Stepping away from bananas and bread for the moment, let me introduce you to my new favourite cookies – equally deserving of emerging from your oven. Spiced brown butter pecan dark chocolate cookies, specifically. (A good mouthful, ok). They lie toward the chewy end of the cookie texture scale, all fudge-y interior and just crisp outer edge, helped along by nutty browned butter and an all-brown sugar dough. A hint of cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and ginger makes your house smell like holiday season without overwhelming the cookie, and they’re studded with toasty pecans and puddles of dark chocolate. It’s also a one bowl mix with no creaming required, and just a 30 minute fridge rest time – you’re less than an hour total from pulling these out of the oven, promise. And for small batch isolation purposes, halving the recipe gets you nine perfect cookies (and if even that’s too many, pop some of the unbaked cookie dough balls in the freezer for next time you need a cookie *asap*)